The first thing Murray Bird saw in the budget meeting was the new boss’s salary and he was “horrified”.
Former politician Robert Cavallucci was hired on nearly double the pay of the last chief executive at Football Queensland (FQ) — almost $320,000 a year.
“No-one else that I know of involved in Queensland community sport is receiving that sort of money,” Mr Bird says.
The CEO was recruited via a two-month consultancy that earned the president of the board Ben Richardson $44,000.
When Mr Bird, the general manager of operations, found out weeks later about the discreet consultancy payment, he says he felt sick that Mr Richardson’s own board had approved his handsome fee.
“I felt duped because … here was a person who was purporting to be doing a voluntary role,” Mr Bird says.
Speaking out for the first time, Mr Bird has given 7.30 an inside account of a salary scandal that has outraged high-profile national players, has led to the hiking of fees for all soccer players in Queensland young and old, and to an internationally known whistleblower being sued.
Former World Cup bid official turned activist Bonita Mersiades is currently defending an $800,000 defamation claim over a blog that revealed the payments in January.
She is “being sued for telling the truth”, Mr Bird says.
The regional sports officials have ignored calls by some of Australian soccer’s biggest names to drop the “spurious” lawsuit, which has sparked international attention and donations for Ms Mersiades’s defence.
Former Socceroo and national team coach Frank Farina says he thinks the lawsuit is “a joke, to be honest”.
A local soccer club with a 99-year history has also been threatened with deregistration over social media posts by its president in support of Ms Mersiades.
‘The sort of money that’s paid to chief executives of pro clubs’
It had been a tough few months at Football Queensland.
The previous chief executive had been sacked.
The president, Mr Richardson, had come in a few days a week to help out.
A recruitment consultant by profession, he led the search for a new CEO.
The last time Mr Richardson volunteered his expertise to recruit the previous CEO, he sorted through more than 100 applicants.
This time it was an extensive process again but the successful candidate was found close to home.
Mr Cavallucci was a director on Football Queensland’s own board.
It was in Mr Cavallucci’s office at PwC Brisbane, where he was a managing partner, that Mr Richardson handed a termination letter to the previous CEO, who says he was given no reason for his sacking.
The previous CEO was on $168,950 a year with a Hyundai company car.
New CEO Mr Cavallucci drove his own Mercedes to work and earned more than he did as an assistant minister in the Newman state government.
His $317,002.50 a year salary was the first item on a spreadsheet in that budget planning meeting on October 28 last year, according to Mr Bird.
“Just flabbergasting … it was the sort of money that’s paid to chief executives of professional clubs, not at community level,” he says.
“But it wasn’t discussed. It was just there. No-one said anything. We moved on to other parts of the budget process.”
A Football Queensland board member at the time, Tony Davis, this week told the ABC the salary was justified for an executive of Mr Cavallucci’s calibre.
“Robert’s worth it,” he said.
Balancing the budget
A 20-year veteran of grassroots sports administration, Mr Bird was one of four executives in the room with Mr Richardson, while they worked on balancing the 2020 budget.
With the CEO costing almost $150,000 more, and a new chief financial officer role costing another $150,000, Football Queensland ended up with a $300,000 dilemma.
“It was a rushed process, and a day-long process where increased executive salaries were put up, some cost savings were discussed, some new initiatives were added to the budget,” Mr Bird says.
“That was the last thing we discussed and the only way to balance the budget would have been to cut staff, cut programs, or increase the [player registration] fees — and it was decided to increase the fees.”
The cost of playing increases weren’t huge: an extra $2.50 a year for children and $5.50 a year for adults.
But spread across more than 70,000 registered players in Queensland, most of them kids, they added up to “about $300,000”, Mr Bird says.
“There was some debate about it, whether it was good timing to do it, is it the right thing to do? But [Mr Richardson’s] bottom line was we need to present a balanced budget to the board.”
Bird faces the members
Days later, Mr Bird thanked Mr Richardson for his voluntary work for Football Queensland in front of a room of 50 people at a zone presidents meeting at Brisbane’s Pullman Hotel.
The president departed, leaving Mr Bird to break the news of the fee increases.
“Some were angry. Some were mystified as to why Football Queensland would be increasing their fees at that point,” Mr Bird says.
“There was a lot of shaking of heads but there wasn’t a great outcry. They had no idea about the executive salaries.”
Weeks later Mr Bird discovered the president wasn’t helping Football Queensland’s recruitment process for free.
He saw Mr Richardson’s invoice for $44,000 for “HR/recruitment services provided September/October 2019”.
He also saw Mr Richardson’s email telling the finance manager the invoice wasn’t to be “discussed with anyone outside of myself… or the FQ board”.
“I felt sick because on three occasions, I’d actually privately and publicly congratulated him on his voluntary commitment to the code,” Mr Bird says.
“To find out that he was paid $40,000 to employ someone from his own board … made me feel sick.
“After feeling sick, I felt angry about it because I had gone to him with requests from staff — who were working 60 and 70 hours a week — for $5,000 pay rises and he’d denied those.”
Another Football Queensland insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, has backed Mr Bird’s account of executive wages contributing to the fee hike, and the belief among the sporting association’s executives that the president’s work was voluntary.
‘Might explain … why the price hike is needed’
Ms Mersiades has taken on some of the most powerful figures in world soccer.
She blew the whistle a decade ago on World Cup bidding practices that led to a bribery scandal and the sport’s biggest corruption crisis.
“That put me into conflict with a lot of people, people in Australia who ran football at the time, people from the president of FIFA down and even nation-states such as Qatar, such as Russia,” she says.
Ms Mersiades lost her job as a national soccer official and found it “very difficult to get work again”.
“I think I’ve had a similar experience to what any whistleblower has. You get enormous blowback,” she says.
Now an influential football writer and activist, Ms Mersiades says she heard rumblings about an unexplained rise in fees paid by soccer mums and dads in Queensland last December.
She thought little of it until she found out about the payments and executive changes at Football Queensland.
In January, her website Football Today revealed the payments which, she wrote, “might explain … why the price hike is needed”.
She asked whether Football Queensland’s stated values of “transparency, accountability and no sweeping under the carpet” would help its officials justify the revelations.
Ms Mersiades says the officials, who hadn’t responded to her original questions, contacted her “saying I needed to take [the article] down immediately, because it was absolutely incorrect”.
“So I went back to them and said: ‘Well, please let me know which bits are incorrect and I’ll correct them’. But that’s not the course of action they took.”
Bird quits after Football Queensland’s denials
After Ms Mersiades’s blog was published, Mr Bird says regional officials peppered him with calls asking: “What the hell’s going on? How can we have a $320,000 CEO? How can the chairman pay himself $40,000?”
Sky News host Peter Gleeson wrote about the revelations in his Courier-Mail column under the headline: “Let’s tackle junior sport’s absurd fees.”
After Gleeson’s column, News Corp’s Queensland managing director Jason Scott got a call from Mr Cavallucci, telling him the piece was wrong. The publisher stood by the story.
Football Queensland geared up for a public relations crisis, hiring an expensive PR firm and writing to its members about “inaccurate media reports” that were “causing reputational damage to our sport”.
“In an attempt to intensify our community’s concerns, these articles sought to link these matters to the cost of participating in our sport,” Mr Richardson said in an email to members in February.
He wrote that “keeping registration fees fair and reasonable … is of the highest priority to Football Queensland” and Mr Cavallucci’s salary was justified and “benchmarked against comparable roles within the Australian market”.
“The board decided that given the big agenda we have for football in our state we needed to elevate the [chief executive officer] position from an administrative to an executive role,” he wrote.
“Rob’s suitability for the role and the appropriateness of his remuneration is further demonstrated by the fact he was shortlisted for the national role of Football Federation of Australia CEO (a much higher paying role).”
Mr Richardson said the board had “unanimously agreed for me to support the organisation on a short-term basis … given the potential risks posed to [Football Queensland] without senior leadership in place”.
For several days a week during September and October, he assisted the general managers at FQ’s Oogan headquarters while overseeing the recruitment of the CEO and CFO.
He said the role “involved considerable time, cost and workload” and his payment was “in accordance with our constitution”, and approved by the board after legal advice.
Watching Football Queensland’s PR response unfold after all that had happened in the months prior, Mr Bird says he was “overwhelmed by the lack of transparency” and left.
“That was enough for me. It was time for me to get out.”
‘$800,000 is a lot of money’
On a Saturday morning almost six months after her blog, while she was doing chores at home, Ms Mersiades received a legal letter.
Mr Cavallucci and Mr Richardson were suing her for defamation in the Queensland District Court, claiming $800,000 in damages.
She has never faced legal action before.
“I think everyone would agree that $800,000 is a lot of money. It would have an enormous impact on me, my family and my family’s future,” Ms Mersiades says.
Ms Mersiades is defending the case by arguing what she wrote was true, in the public interest and contained honest opinion.
“What they’re trying to do now is to ensure that someone who dares to raise uncomfortable issues, and uncomfortable questions is silenced,” she says.
In court filings, the two officials say they were falsely accused of corruptly removing the former CEO so Mr Cavallucci could take over “at an exorbitantly higher salary package” and Mr Richardson could score a “lucrative consulting gig”.
Ms Mersiades’s blog caused them “substantial hurt, distress and embarrassment” and “enormous damage” to their personal and professional reputations, according to their statements of claim.
They did not sue the Courier-Mail.
The legal action against a prominent football whistleblower drew the attention of sportswriters overseas, and public condemnation from a group of former Socceroos known as The Golden Generation, including John Aloisi, Lucas Neill, Craig Moore and Mark Viduka.
“We urge the board of Football Queensland to drop this spurious defamation action against Bonita or be forever condemned for failing to put football first,” the group said in a statement.
The officials updated their claims in a bid to hold Ms Mersiades liable for aggravated damages from follow-up stories by journalists in Germany and Ireland.
Those overseas journalists have claimed they were mysteriously hacked from an unknown computer in Brisbane while investigating the story about Football Queensland.
There is no suggestion that FQ or its officials are involved in the alleged hacking.
A key supporter of Ms Mersiades at a community club also came under pressure.
Mr Cavallucci threatened to deregister the Wynnum Wolves, a club which has represented Brisbane’s outer-eastern suburbs, including its coastal edge overlooking Moreton Bay, for 99 years.
He claimed club president Rabieh Krayem, who posted support for Ms Mersiades on social media, breached Football Queensland’s requirement that officials don’t make “any adverse critical or disparaging statements or comments about FQ”.
Mr Krayem had set up a crowdfunding page which raised over $15,000 for Ms Mersiades’s legal defence against the Football Queensland officials.
“It’s surprising how many people — high-profile people within our game — who donated money, but remained anonymous,” he says.
“I think what we’ve created in football in Queensland is a culture of people who are scared to speak up.”
Those who put their name to donations include Frank Farina.
“I find it pretty crazy,” he says.
“We should be able to ask questions about governance, anything about the game.
“In my personal opinion, I find it a joke, to be honest.”
Mr Cavallucci, Mr Richardson and Football Queensland all declined interviews with the ABC.
In a statement, their lawyer Ashley Tiplady said the organisation followed an “independent process … including third-party involvement”.
He said that “in due course, we expect that we will receive instructions to investigate the catalyst for your investigations and the story to be run, including through the compulsory provision of documents to our clients”.
Mr Bird, now living in Melbourne running a sports tech outfit supplying AFL clubs, says he is speaking out “because it’s the right thing to do”.
“I’m across the facts — and she’s being sued for telling the truth,” he says.
“People shouldn’t be getting $40,000 on voluntary boards and CEOs shouldn’t be getting $320,000 a year to run what is basically … a community organisation.
Ms Mersiades says the insider’s account is “consistent with the questions I raised”.
“Generally, whistleblowers have been in the room,” she says.
“They know what’s happened because they have been part of that and so, therefore, they are people who should be listened to.”
Watch the story tonight on 7.30.
